Kevin Drum has a plan to create jobs and improve this nation's infrastructure. Will it work? Very likely. Will it be implemented? Very unlikely. Hey, but at least someone has a plan that doesn't involve making the rich richer and hoping they create a few new jobs that right now, they don't seem to have any reason to create.
A lot of folks who come to this site are interested in careers in cartoon voice work. They shouldn't be coming here. They should be going over to Rob Paulsen's site and listening to his podcasts and maybe consider taking one of his classes. Rob is the voice of Pinky on Pinky and the Brain. He's the voice of Yakko on Animaniacs. He's Mr. Opportunity in those Mr. Opportunity commercials. He's one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He works all the time and it's amazing (and admirable) that he finds the hours to teach and coach. There are a lot of voice tutors out there who don't know what they're doing. Rob is the other kind.
Earlier this morn, I embedded a link to a talk Mel Brooks gave at the Egyptian Theater last year. It worked when I embedded it but shortly after, its uploader apparently decided to make it private...and therefore unavailable to strangers. Sorry. Here to make up for that is a video from the same film festival. They ran Ten From Your Show of Shows with Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner and Howie Morris and followed it with this conversation with Reiner and Brooks. It's poor video and not the best audio but you should be able to make most of it out. It's in four parts which should play one after the other in the player below...unless someone makes it private.
Matt Taibbi discusses a possible Republican strategy for 2012: Try to convince everyone the world is about to end. The trouble with that (of course) is that if the world is about to end, it doesn't really matter who gets elected, does it?
Roger Evans writes to thank me for posting his great re-creation of the Jonny Quest titles and to reassure me that no CGI was employed; that every bit of it was done via stop-motion animation. That makes it even more impressive than I thought. He has more info on this amazing creation at his website. He also notes his respect and indebtedness to Doug Wildey.
Doug Wildey, creator of Jonny Quest, is another guy I should write about. Doug was a colorful guy...even more so than the character Dave Stevens based on him in The Rocketeer. Around Hanna-Barbera, there were a lot of brilliant artists and creative talents even if all that artistry and creativity didn't always make its way to the screen. The studio was a mixed blessing for these guys. It gave them steady (for the most part) employment. Veve Risto, a very fine cartoonist who worked for H-B, too often on projects he didn't like, once said to me, "If not for Bill and Joe [meaning Hanna and Barbera], a lot of us [meaning artists, primarily older ones] would have wound up selling tires at Sears [meaning they would not have been drawing anything for anyone]."
But the place had a tendency to beat good people down; to turn them into assembly line workers who were satisfied to come in, do a decent day's work for a decent day's pay and then go home, unconcerned with how it all came out. Doug wasn't one of those. He was feisty. He was confrontational. He was willing to fight and campaign and even fib a little to get the best possible product. He could never quite understand why this was frowned-upon by the folks running the company, Mssrs. Hanna and Barbera included.
Doug had the office next door to mine for a while when he was producing the 1978+ Godzilla cartoon show for Hanna-Barbera. I won't claim it was the best animated series ever done or even in the top ten. But I'm quite sure it was as good as anyone could have done in that studio at that time. I once had to break up a possible fist fight that seemed about to happen between Doug and another H-B producer. Doug was unashamedly stealing all the good artists off this other guy's show and getting them assigned to Godzilla.
An observer of all this later made a comment that Doug was Godzilla in that he really didn't care who he stepped on. I'm sure he came across that way to some but I knew him well enough to know he did care. He just didn't always let that stop him. He felt that The System there stepped on everyone to some extent and that you had to do a little stepping of your own just to not get crushed. I wasn't around when he did Jonny Quest there in 1964 — I was home watching — but I heard enough to know the following: That Doug's style as both an artist and as a combatant was the answer to two questions. One was why that show was so good and the other was why Doug didn't work a lot for H-B.
Last year while many of us were down at the Comic-Con in San Diego, I missed an event at the Egyptian Theater up in Hollywood I would have liked to have attended. They ran Blazing Saddles and Silent Movie...and had Mel Brooks speak between the pics. Fortunately, someone recorded it and it's up on YouTube. Very few things I have missed in my life will never be on YouTube.
It runs 50 minutes and Mel tells a few stories in ways he's never told them before. The anecdote about hiring and firing Gig Young for Blazing Saddles is quite different from how I've heard it before, including one time when I was sitting on the floor of his office at 20th Century Fox as Mel was interviewed for some magazine. As told back then, Young was forced on him by the studio...and had a pretty ugly breakdown on the set during the first (and Young's only) day of shooting. Brooks also omits the part of the story where he previously offered the part of the Waco Kid to Johnny Carson, who thought the script was quite unfunny and a surefire flop.
But hey, it's Mel Brooks talking for 50 minutes. How can that not be fun?
September 1, 2011
